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John DeNero wins 2018 UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award

Assistant Teaching Prof. John DeNero has won a 59th Annual Distinguished Teaching Award. The award, presented by the Academic Senate, recognizes U.C. Berkeley's brightest teaching stars for their inspiring and transformational teaching. DeNero says his teaching goal is not necessarily to make students happy but to help them learn how to solve problems that they thought they couldn't solve. He has a knack for grabbing attention, exciting students, and in many ways, serves as a pioneer. He teaches his introductory course for computer science majors, CS 61A, to nearly 1,600 students in 47 sections with the help of a course staff of 95 undergraduates. Distinguished Teachers are frequently called upon by the campus to provide a voice in issues related to teaching. They serve on forums, panels, and committees involving teaching issues, and they are advocates for excellence in teaching at Berkeley.

Michael Jordan named Plenary Lecturer at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM)

Prof. Michael Jordan has been named a Plenary Lecturer at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), which will take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in August. ICM is considered the world’s premier forum for presenting and discussing new mathematical discoveries. Plenary speakers are invited from around the world to present one-hour lectures which are held without other parallel activities--an honor that has been bestowed on only a small handful of computer scientists over the 121 year history of the ICM.

Ashokavardhanan, Jung, and McConnell named KPCB Engineering Fellows

Undergraduate students Ganeshkumar Ashokavardhanan (EECS + Business M.E.T.), Naomi Jung (CS BA), and Louie McConnell (EECS + Business M.E.T.) have been selected to participate in the 2018 KPCB Engineering Fellows Program, named one of the top 5 internship programs by Vault. Over the course of a summer, KPCB Engineering Fellows join portfolio companies, where they develop their technical skills and are each mentored by an executive within the company. It offers students an opportunity to gain significant work experience at Silicon Valley startups, collaborating on unique and challenging technical problems.

Shankar Raman named 2018 MIT MacVicar Fellow

Alumnus Shankar Raman (EE M.S. '88), now a professor of literature at MIT, has been named a 2018 MacVicar Fellow. The MIT MacVicar Faculty Fellows Program recognizes professors who are champions of teaching and advising, and who engage with students to advance the mission of the Institute. After obtaining his B.S. in electrical engineering from MIT and master's from Berkeley, Raman changed fields and received a master's and Ph.D. in English literature from Stanford. His research ranges from Renaissance and late-Medieval literature and culture to post-colonialism and literary theory. His unconventional career path has proven particularly beneficial to his students. “One of the most unique and helpful aspects of Prof. Raman’s advising,” one former student wrote, “was his ability to leverage his own unique life trajectory, which enables him to connect with MIT students on their own technically-minded terms better than most.”

For the second year running, UC Berkeley has won the Fiesta Bowl Overwatch Collegiate National Championship, sweeping UC Irvine 3-0. CS majors Kevin "SlurpeeThief" Royston and Gandira “Syeikh” Prahandika were on the Berkeley team, which battled in front of a sold-out crowd at the game in Tempe, Arizona, the first partnership between a collegiate bowl game and eSports tournament. Royston, who was profiled in on Overwatch Wire article before the tournament, is in the top 1% of all players worldwide, has had a peak skill rating of 4626, and was on the winning team last year. He notes that the balance between esports and school has been a tough road. “It’s definitely rough, this week is the first time I had a homework assignment slip because of Overwatch. (Laughs) Hear me out! It’s for Machine Learning which is the hardest class at Berkeley. We had to travel (for the Fiesta Bowl) and I worked sixteen hours on an assignment and didn’t even get halfway through it.” Overwatch is a team-based shooter game that was created by Blizzard Entertainment and released in 2016. Teams are made up of six players, who select different characters, known in the game as “heroes,” to complete different objectives. The Berkeley team won $42,000 of the $100,000 total in scholarships and other prizes.

Anca Dragan and Raluca Popa win Sloan Research Fellowships

Assistant Profs. Anca Dragan and Raluca Ada Popa have been awarded 2018 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowships. They are among 126 early-career scholars who represent the most promising scientific researchers working today. Their achievements and potential place them among the next generation of scientific leaders in the U.S. and Canada. Winners receive $65,000, which may be spent over a two-year term on any expense supportive of their research. Popa and Dragan were both selected in the Compter Science category. Popa is a co-founder of the RISELab where she is trying to develop a learning and analytics framework that can run on encrypted data. Dragan runs the InterACT lab and is a PI for the Center for Human-Compatible AI. Her goal is to enable robots to work with, around and in support of people, autonomously generating behavior in a way that formally accounts for their interactions with humans. “The Sloan Research Fellows represent the very best science has to offer,” said foundation president Adam Falk. “The brightest minds, tackling the hardest problems, and succeeding brilliantly – fellows are quite literally the future of 21st century science.”

Berkeley's HKN Mu Chapter wins IEEE-HKN Outstanding Chapter Award

UC Berkeley's Eta Kappa Nu (HKN) Mu Chapter has won the 2016-17 IEEE-HKN Outstanding Chapter Award. The Berkeley Mu Chapter of HKN, the the national Electrical and Computer Engineering honor society, is among the most active engineering societies on campus and provides many services to the undergraduate student community including course surveys and a course guide, tutoring and review sessions, industrial infosessions and a career fair, and department tours for prospective students. The Outstanding Chapter Award is conferred by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)-HKN Board of Governors and is presented to HKN chapters in recognition of excellence in their chapter administration and programs. Berkeley HKN, which has won the Outstanding Chapter Award every year since 1998-99, is advised by Prof. Anant Sahai. The award will be presented at a conference in Monterey in March.

Edward Lee awarded Berkeley Citation

Prof. Edward Lee is a 2018 recipient of the Berkeley Citation, which was awarded at the 2018 Berkeley Annual Research Symposium (BEARS). The Berkeley Citation is awarded to distinguished individuals whose contributions to UC Berkeley go beyond the call of duty and whose achievements exceed the standards of excellence in their fields. Lee, who is the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor in EECS, has been on the faculty since 1986. He was the EE division and EECS department Chair from 2005-2008, the director of the nine-university TerraSwarm Research Center, a director of the Berkeley Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems Research Center, and the director of the Berkeley Ptolemy project. He recently published Plato and the Nerd - The Creative Partnership of Humans and Technology (MIT Press, 2017).

Constance Chang-Hasnain and David Tse elected members of the National Academy of Engineering

Prof. Constance Chang-Hasnain and Adjunct Prof. David Tse have been elected members of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature" and to "the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education." Chang-Hasnain was elected "for contributions to wavelength tunable diode lasers and multiwavelength laser arrays." Tse was elected "for contributions to wireless network information theory." 37 of the 2,293 current U.S. members are EECS faculty.

Alumnus Jiawang Nie (Ph.D. '06, co-advisors: James Demmel and Bernd Sturmfels) has won the 2018 Best Paper Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Activity Group on Linear Algebra (SIAG/LA). His paper, Generating Polynomials and Symmetric Tensor Decompositions, Foundations of Computational Mathematics, was deemd the most outstanding paper, as determined by the prize committee, on a topic in applicable linear algebra published in English in a peer-reviewed journal. 8 out of 11 of the previous awards, which are chosen every 3 years, have gone to EECS faculty, postdocs, and graduate students. Nie is now a Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. He will present his work in Hong Kong on May 4-8 at the SIAM Conference on Applied Linear Algebra (SIAM-ALA18).